I have friends, both men and women, who find many of the accusations of sexual harassment and rape incredible to believe, exaggerated, or, at least, redolent of a missing context. A few have likened the #metoo and #timesup movements to a witch hunt that threatens to sweep away the innocent as well as the guilty. Others express a kind of complacency that only weak, naïve, and unassertive women would find themselves in circumstances that practically invite assault or harassment -- as if proximity to men posed the same dangers as entering a tiger's cage without protective, claw-proof clothing.
None of this is new. I remember similar debates in the early 70s about women "asking for it." When as a young woman, barely out of my teens, I, too, chose to go around for a brief period without a bra, like so many other "women's libbers." The only thing I was seeking was comfort. I have always hated wearing bras, but my braless experiment did not last long. I was made to feel so self-conscious in public that I gave up. I covered myself in order to avert the sexualized gazes and paws of men. Not, however, before being dragged into a backroom by a much older man, who tried to kiss me in the department store where I had a summer job. I pushed him off and ran out. The incident scared me. Other, similar encounters in my late teenage years reinforced my wariness. The unarticulated lesson I took from these experiences was that I brought it on myself by dressing for comfort as I did. Being in men's sexual gaze made me feel vulnerable from then on.
Of course, as a young woman I had never heard the phrase, "the sexual gaze." I was simply aware of eyes too often falling below my chin. Eventually, I had to accept that I felt more comfortable with my breasts strapped in place. I wondered, what did women do before the bra, which became a commonplace article of clothing only in the early twentieth century? Did bras discourage or encourage groping? Or were bras part of a pervasive shift in American erotic culture, in which breasts became sexualized in a way they hadn't been before? Many decades later, I sympathized with the motivation of some observant Muslim women to cover their hair and faces. I understood the desire to remove themselves from the public, anonymous sexual gaze by dressing modestly and covering their hair. Some women's surrender, including mine, to subtle pressures to cover and encase our female bodies has become normative. Some of the women in my own family believe that young women invite trouble through their choice of fashion -- skin-tight, crotch-high dresses, exposed skin, and the like. We have collectively bought into the idea that male libidos are, in their natural state, barely governable. An idea that goes all the way back to early Jewish, Christian and Muslim notions of Eve's responsibility for Adam's disobedience, women share the burden for men's potential for unruliness in their presence. I was recently reminded of the extent to which we take this idea for granted.
Around the time the storm over Harvey Weinstein broke, I happened to have reached the part in Langston Hughes's 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, where he joins the crew of a merchant freighter headed to the west coast of Africa. After crossing the Atlantic, the vessel makes its way down the African coast, stopping at ports along the way. If the captain released a portion of their pay, the racially-mixed crew would go ashore in search of alcohol and women. If the captain didn't issue wages, the cash-poor, pent-up men stayed on the ship. One night, "two little African girls" rowed out to the ship from the port and came aboard. Members of the crew quickly hustled them below deck and into the sailors' cabin.
Firemen, messboys, cooks, the bo'sun, Chips, the oilers poured forth from their respective sleeping places. The bo'sun, boss-like, grabbed one of the girls and took her off privately to his cabin. Someone threw the other girl down on the floor on a blanket in the middle of the sailors' quarters and stripped her of her flowered cloth.
She lay there naked and held up her hands. The girl said: "Mon-nee! Mon-nee!" But nobody had any money.
Thirty men crowded around, mostly in their underwear, sat up on bunks to watch, smoked, yelled, and joked, and waited for their turn. Each time a man would rise, the little African girl on the floor would say: "Mon-nee! Mon-nee!" But nobody had a cent, yet they wouldn't let her get up. Finally, I couldn't bear to hear her crying: "Mon-nee!" any more, so I went to bed. But the festival went on all night. (The Big Sea, p. 108).
Hughes's decision to go to bed, instead of intervening, makes this scene of casual torture of a woman much more pernicious than, say, Ayn Rand's description in her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, of a woman submitting to a violent rape. Rand intended the rape scene in her book to shock her reader. Hughes, in contrast, included the vignette of a gang rape not to shock and perhaps not to entertain his reader, but rather to fascinate his reader. Such events, he seems to imply, were the curious incidents that occurred at night on the ship.
How would I have read this before the #metoo movement's launch? Would I have shuddered and quickly read on? My reaction today to this section of Hughes's autobiography embodies the definition of "woke." To be "wakened" doesn't entail a big "Aha!" moment. It means instead that I am now no longer fascinated or entertained by violence. I no longer accept the premise that the African woman on the floor of the sailors' cabin on Hughes's ship asked for the treatment she received. And I no longer believe that men are just that way. If the violence of Nazi Germany has taught us anything, it's that all human beings have the capacity for violence, but no one asks for it.
None of this is new. I remember similar debates in the early 70s about women "asking for it." When as a young woman, barely out of my teens, I, too, chose to go around for a brief period without a bra, like so many other "women's libbers." The only thing I was seeking was comfort. I have always hated wearing bras, but my braless experiment did not last long. I was made to feel so self-conscious in public that I gave up. I covered myself in order to avert the sexualized gazes and paws of men. Not, however, before being dragged into a backroom by a much older man, who tried to kiss me in the department store where I had a summer job. I pushed him off and ran out. The incident scared me. Other, similar encounters in my late teenage years reinforced my wariness. The unarticulated lesson I took from these experiences was that I brought it on myself by dressing for comfort as I did. Being in men's sexual gaze made me feel vulnerable from then on.
Of course, as a young woman I had never heard the phrase, "the sexual gaze." I was simply aware of eyes too often falling below my chin. Eventually, I had to accept that I felt more comfortable with my breasts strapped in place. I wondered, what did women do before the bra, which became a commonplace article of clothing only in the early twentieth century? Did bras discourage or encourage groping? Or were bras part of a pervasive shift in American erotic culture, in which breasts became sexualized in a way they hadn't been before? Many decades later, I sympathized with the motivation of some observant Muslim women to cover their hair and faces. I understood the desire to remove themselves from the public, anonymous sexual gaze by dressing modestly and covering their hair. Some women's surrender, including mine, to subtle pressures to cover and encase our female bodies has become normative. Some of the women in my own family believe that young women invite trouble through their choice of fashion -- skin-tight, crotch-high dresses, exposed skin, and the like. We have collectively bought into the idea that male libidos are, in their natural state, barely governable. An idea that goes all the way back to early Jewish, Christian and Muslim notions of Eve's responsibility for Adam's disobedience, women share the burden for men's potential for unruliness in their presence. I was recently reminded of the extent to which we take this idea for granted.
Around the time the storm over Harvey Weinstein broke, I happened to have reached the part in Langston Hughes's 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, where he joins the crew of a merchant freighter headed to the west coast of Africa. After crossing the Atlantic, the vessel makes its way down the African coast, stopping at ports along the way. If the captain released a portion of their pay, the racially-mixed crew would go ashore in search of alcohol and women. If the captain didn't issue wages, the cash-poor, pent-up men stayed on the ship. One night, "two little African girls" rowed out to the ship from the port and came aboard. Members of the crew quickly hustled them below deck and into the sailors' cabin.
Firemen, messboys, cooks, the bo'sun, Chips, the oilers poured forth from their respective sleeping places. The bo'sun, boss-like, grabbed one of the girls and took her off privately to his cabin. Someone threw the other girl down on the floor on a blanket in the middle of the sailors' quarters and stripped her of her flowered cloth.
She lay there naked and held up her hands. The girl said: "Mon-nee! Mon-nee!" But nobody had any money.
Thirty men crowded around, mostly in their underwear, sat up on bunks to watch, smoked, yelled, and joked, and waited for their turn. Each time a man would rise, the little African girl on the floor would say: "Mon-nee! Mon-nee!" But nobody had a cent, yet they wouldn't let her get up. Finally, I couldn't bear to hear her crying: "Mon-nee!" any more, so I went to bed. But the festival went on all night. (The Big Sea, p. 108).
Hughes's decision to go to bed, instead of intervening, makes this scene of casual torture of a woman much more pernicious than, say, Ayn Rand's description in her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, of a woman submitting to a violent rape. Rand intended the rape scene in her book to shock her reader. Hughes, in contrast, included the vignette of a gang rape not to shock and perhaps not to entertain his reader, but rather to fascinate his reader. Such events, he seems to imply, were the curious incidents that occurred at night on the ship.
How would I have read this before the #metoo movement's launch? Would I have shuddered and quickly read on? My reaction today to this section of Hughes's autobiography embodies the definition of "woke." To be "wakened" doesn't entail a big "Aha!" moment. It means instead that I am now no longer fascinated or entertained by violence. I no longer accept the premise that the African woman on the floor of the sailors' cabin on Hughes's ship asked for the treatment she received. And I no longer believe that men are just that way. If the violence of Nazi Germany has taught us anything, it's that all human beings have the capacity for violence, but no one asks for it.
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